Christa Pike, who survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection a month ago, is speaking out for the first time, saying she is recovering, “but healing is not the same as being okay.”
“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak,” Pike said in a written statement her attorneys say was dictated to them. “And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”
Pike, 50, was hospitalized after she survived two doses of pentobarbital as the state attempted to execute her on September 30 for the 1995 beating and stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer. Soon after the failed procedure, Pike was on a ventilator, and her attorneys did not expect her to survive. But she woke up and later began talking and walking with assistance.
Why don’t we take the victim’s family into account?
If someone did that to my loved one I’d want them deader than dead. I’d be furious if I had to know that scum was alive for decades. It would eat away at me until they died. I’d never rid myself of the compulsion to enact revenge.
A death sentence being carried out can bring closure to victim’s loved ones.
That’s why i said to detach hate from objective morality. Sure, I would want that cunt dead too, if a loved one would’ve been her victim. But…
a) …only by MY hand
b) …being incarcerated for decades, isolated, every day knowing “maybe they’ll tell me today when it’s over” only to be tortured when she actually welcomed death…that is kinda worse than just killing her
c) …closure? My loved one is still dead. Now is the killer too. Would not change much to me, personally. Unless maybe a)
d) …a civilized nation simply does not do this. Only barbarians. We’re all corrupt enough, we must not also be primitives.